Although he is best remembered as Russell, one of two rebellious teenage brothers – the other, Adam, was played by Nicholas Lyndhurst – in Carla Lane’s television sitcom series Butterflies (1978-83), Andrew Hall, who has died of cancer aged 65, had a wide-ranging career that took him from the Royal Court and the RSC to major tours around Britain, and 18 months in Mamma Mia! in the West End.
He also founded a producing company with the actor Tracey Childs, the former star of Howards’ Way, whom he had met on Derek Nimmo’s far eastern tour of Ben Elton’s Gasping in 2000. At the new Garrick theatre in Lichfield, in 2009, he directed Childs as Martha in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with Matthew Kelly as George, and when the show was invited to come into the Trafalgar Studios in London – both lead performances were tremendous – he and Childs created their new company on an impulse to present it.
Hall subsequently directed revivals of Ayckbourn’s odd and spooky Haunting Julia (2011) and Diane Samuels’ Kindertransport (in 2014) – both shows toured extensively and garnered good reviews – but he caused more of a stir when, in 2011, he appeared for six months in Coronation Street as Marc Selby, the transvestite lover of Audrey Roberts (Sue Nicholls); their romantic cover was blown when he appeared as “Marcia” in full drag in the Rovers Return.
You could never guess what Hall would do next. He was temperamentally inquisitive, always busy, and matured easily from the fresh-faced, skinny, bubble-haired lad of Butterflies – in which Wendy Craig dallied with adultery in her marriage to dentist and amateur lepidopterist Geoffrey Palmer – to the strikingly square-jawed and handsome lead actor in touring productions of Coward’s Hay Fever, Michael Frayn’s Noises Off and Ray Cooney’s Out of Order.
He never sat around if the work dried up. In a lean period in the 1990s he launched a company to develop fertility awareness, promoting a sympto-thermal method of family planning without contraception. And for the last 15 years he formed another, Media Assessment UK, which put high-powered candidates for jobs in the political and charitable sectors through their paces in mocked-up broadcasting studios. He was inquisitor-in-chief, and wrote all the reports.
This latter enterprise owed something to his father, James Hall, who was an IT specialist and executive search consultant. His mother, Mabel (nee Jones), also worked in IT and, later, adult education. Andrew was born in Manchester, and the family – he had two sisters – were peripatetic in the area, and the Midlands, before settling in Guildford, Surrey, where he attended the Royal Grammar school and played Romeo.
He left school aged 17 and took a job as a stagehand and flyman in the local theatre, the Yvonne Arnaud, before joining the Northcott theatre, Exeter, where, during Jane Howell’s exciting tenure in the early 1970s, he was an assistant stage manager. He gained more precious experience as a stage manager for Glen Walford’s Bubble Theatre (he put up the tent in public parks) and at the Royal Court, working on David Hare’s Teeth ’n’ Smiles (1975) starring Helen Mirren. He then trained as an actor at Lamda. There he met Abigail Sharp, whom he married in 1977.
Butterflies was his first job on graduating, and he then joined the RSC for the 1984-85 season in Stratford-upon-Avon, Newcastle and the Barbican, London. He played Osric to Roger Rees’s Hamlet, Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet and Flute in Sheila Hancock’s small-scale touring version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He also appeared opposite Frances Barber in Pam Gems’s Camille and directed the “Not the RSC” company in John Fowles’s The Collector, in an informal summer season at the Almeida theatre in London.
His television career after Butterflies was mainly a patchwork of appearances in almost every soap – Brookside, Casualty, Hollyoaks, EastEnders, Holby City, Judge John Deed – and he chipped in to the endless 1993 TV movie (200 minutes) of Jilly Cooper’s Riders, a saga of show-jumping rivalry and sex in the saddle devoid of any mounting excitement. He was seen to better effect as the charismatic evangelist Billy Graham in Sky Arts’ Nixon’s the One (2013) starring Harry Shearer as Nixon and David Frost as himself.
Blood Drive (2017) on Syfy was an American science fiction series set in a dystopic future after “the great fracking quakes”, with the LA police caught up in a death race in cars running on human blood. Hall was typecast as the Gentleman. Just as gruesome was his last movie, Kill Ben Lyk (2018), a comedy murder thriller in which all the victims are called Ben Lyk and all surviving Ben Lyks are gathered together by Scotland Yard for their own safety, they hope.
Andrew and Abigail made their home in Godalming, Surrey, where, in another quiet period, he built a shepherd’s hut. He is survived by Abigail and their two children, Joshua and Kate, and by his mother, two grandchildren and two sisters, Carolyn and Julie.
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